Europe

From the fall of Napoleon to Revolution in Russia and from the rise of Hitler to the fall of the Berlin Wall this period is one of major upheaval in Europe. We see the collapse of monarchies and empires and the changing status of women and working men. This is a time that witnesses the mass displacement of peoples and genocide on a scale never seen before it is also a time that sees changes in medicine and technology that make fundamental changes to our everyday lives. Read more

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  • Between the Revolutions: Russia 1905 to 1917

    Article

    "The key question is this - is the peaceful renovation of the country possible? Or is it possible only by internal revolution?"This quotation succintly expresses the problem that faced both contemporaries and subsequant generations of historians confronting the development of Russia between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The upheavals...

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  • The Versailles Peace Settlement

    Article

    This classic pamphlet takes you through the Paris Peace Conference and the 'German Question', Peacemaking and the Treaty of Versailles, Europe and the German question after Versailles.

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  • British Defence and Appeasement Between the Wars 1919-1939

    Article

    Armed forces never exist in isolation, but always operate against a background of political, economic, social, cultural, intellectual and ideological conditions and attitudes, as well as in relation to diplomatic and strategic factors. Some governments regards their military forces especially their armies, more as instruments for maintaining internal order than...

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  • Nazism and Stalinism

    Article

    Is it legitimate to compare the Nazi and Stalinist regimes? There might seem little room for doubt. It is often taken as self-evident that the two regimes were variations of a common type. They are bracketed together in school and university courses, as well as text books, under labels such...

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  • The Enlightenment

    Article

    Can a movement as varied and diffuse as the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century be contained within the covers of a short pamphlet? The problem would certainly have appealed to the intellectuals of that time. Generalists rather than specialists, citizens of the whole world of knowledge, they relished the challenge...

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  • Anorexia Nervosa in the nineteenth century

    Article

    First referred to by Richard Morton (1637-98) in his Phthisiologia under the denomination phthisis nervosa as long ago as 1689, anorexia nervosa was given its name in a note by Sir William Gull (1816-90) in 1874. Gull had earlier described a disorder he termed apepsia hysterica, involving extreme emaciation without...

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  • Wellington's Soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars

    Article

    Wellington's Soldiers in the Napoleonic WarsThe war with France, which began in 1793, had moved to the Iberian Peninsula by 1808. This year is therefore the two-hundredth anniversary of the commencement of the Peninsular War campaigns. War on the Peninsula demanded huge resources of manpower in order to defeat Napoleon....

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  • After the Uprising of 1956: Hungarian Students in Britain

    Article

    Much has been written during the last 50 years about the events leading up to and during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. Less consideration has been given to the students who arrived in Britain as refugees. During the weeks following the Soviet intervention in Hungary around 25,000 people were killed...

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  • The Last Duke of Lorraine

    Article

    The Place Stanislas in Nancy has a high reputation. But expectations are far surpassed as one surveys the beautifully proportioned square, with its imposing buildings such as the Hôtel de Ville and the Governor's Palace, its Arc de Triomphe and its magnificent iron work. It is a reminder of how...

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  • Personality & Power: The individual's role in the history of twentieth-century Europe

    Article

    What role do individuals wielding great power play in determining significant historical change? And how do historians locate human agency in historical change, and explain it? These are the issues I would like to reflect a little upon here. They are not new problems. But they are inescapable ones for...

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  • Beware the serpent of Rome

    Article

    On 14 February 1868, the Carlisle Journal reported as follows: … two meetings were held in the Athenaeum in this city , “for the purpose of forming an auxiliary to co-operate with the Church Association in London, to uphold the principles and order of the United Church of England and...

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  • Radiating the Revolution: Agitation in the Russian Civil War 1917-21

    Article

    When the Bolsheviks seized power in what was essentially a carefully organised coup d’état in October 1917, they seized control only of the levers of central power in the then capital, Petrograd, which had already become the centre of working-class discontent. What they most emphatically did not do was to...

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  • The British Union of Fascists: the international dimension

    Article

    Fascism failed in Britain in the 1930s – Europe’s decade of the ‘Brown plague’. Unlike in many European countries, fascists in Britain were never a serious threat to the democratic order. This was not for want of trying, especially on the part of Sir Oswald Mosley and his British Union...

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  • To what extent was the failure of denazification in Germany 1945-48 a result of the apathy of the allies?

    Article

    To blame the failure of the denazification process in postwar Germany entirely on a vague and generalised concept such as apathy is simplistic and does not stand up to serious scrutiny. Denazification was one of the most ambitious attempts ever at provoking an artificial revolution; it is reasonable to assume...

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  • British Christians and European Integration

    Article

    Despite Britain’s longstanding membership of the European Union, the question of ‘Europe’ continues to loom large in the nation’s politics. Whilst the economic pros and cons of Britain ‘joining’ the euro might be understood by only a select few, that issue provides for the many an opportunity to debate Britain’s...

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  • Hungarian Nationalism in International Context

    Article

    All aspects of Hungarian nationalism – with one exception, which I shall consider later – had more or less similar counterparts elsewhere in Europe; but the blending of those elements yielded a unique constellation. Moreover, the ingredients of this mixture proved highly disruptive for central Europe, indeed at times for...

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  • The Uses of History in the Twenty First Century

    Article

    During the last century or so there has developed a new ‘public role’ for history: the past as personal history, a vital element in the nourishing of people in society. During the past decades a new perception of what history is has manifested itself on two levels: first a shift of...

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  • Bismarck

    Article

    Readers of this journal will need no introduction to Otto von Bismarck. There are almost as many English-language biographies of him as those written in German. The four short studies by Lynn Abrams, Bismarck and the German Empire, 1871-1918 (1995); Andrina Stiles, The Unification of Germany, 1815-1890 (1986); D. G....

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  • Opposition and Resistance in the GDR

    Article

    A journalistic coup broke over Germany on 2 January 1978. The West German news magazine, Der Spiegel, published the first part of a longer piece in which an association calling itself the ‘Alliance of German Democratic Communists’ seriously criticized the policies of the East German Communist Party, the SED, and...

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  • Bombing and the Air War on the Italian Front 1915-1918

    Article

    During the First World War air operations were on a much smaller scale on the Italian front than in France and Flanders. Italian fighter pilots claimed to have shot down fewer than a tenth of the number of enemy aircraft officially credited to German fighter pilots operating over the Western...

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